Making a comeback from burn out.

It’s been almost 8 years since my last post. It was supposed to be a two part mini-series on how to write better asp.net web forms templates. I never finished that mini-series, and won’t.

You see, around that time, I became pretty burnt out software development. I was fighting back against the movement of everything to web apps. Cloud was on the horizon, the web was becoming king, and everyone wanted some kind of web based application. Compound that with being on a development team for the same company for 9 years and the same application for a little over 4 years. I was done.

I traveled around, hoping to move to better places, with more opportunities. I interviewed at many awesome (and some not so awesome) companies and met many pretty cool people. In the end, I quit developing. My heart just wasn’t in it anymore. I felt like I had stagnated because of where I was and it was an insurmountable problem trying to get back to where I needed to be.

I had also started to develop a new passion. I loved hardware and networking. I was dabbling in server administration and deployment. I decided to change careers. Unfortunately, this usually means starting over, which is what I did.

I took a position as customer support (help desk) for a small software company. I was going to dual role there. Customer support with a dabbling in maintaining their network and infrastructure… Best laid plans…

I ended up managing the customer support team and then migrated to IT Manager. I started doing more devops as well. Software deployments and customer provisioning was all scripted using a mix of powershell and mostly C# code. The more devops I became involved in, the more the passion started to come back. I realized that part of being burned out is just being bored. Had I pushed myself into more web tech, I probably would have never left.

A few months ago, the company I work for lost their entire development staff. Between retirements and leaving for greener pastures, we were left with no one. So I did what any good employee would do, is volunteer to help out. My only role: create a new greenfield project that’s entirely web based.

After a few weeks, I knew I was back and wanted to stay. The thing that had me absolutely convinced of that, was the learning new things. When I started to learn new technologies, new frameworks, new languages (hello my new best friend, TypeScript), I was excited. The flame is burning strong.

As developers, we can’t quit learning. Once we get bored, we lose focus. We lose that passion. Stay thirsty.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Email Address(required)

Website

About

A site dedicated to software development. The industry, the code, and the lifestyle.

Find It

Donations

Did I help you in some way that you want to show me your appreciation?